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Early life and education

The elder child of Dale Burdell Ride and Carol Joyce (née Anderson), Ride was born in Los Angeles, California. She had one sibling, Karen "Bear" Ride, who is a Presbyterian minister. Both parents were elders in the Presbyterian Church. Ride's mother had worked as a volunteer counselor at a women's correctional facility. Her father had been a political science professor at Santa Monica College.[3]

Ride was one of 8,000 people who answered an advertisement in the Stanford student newspaper seeking applicants for the space program.[6] She was chosen to join NASA in 1978.[7] During her career, Ride served as the ground-based capsule communicator (CapCom) for the second and third space shuttle flights (STS-2 and STS-3) and helped develop the space shuttle's "Canadarm" robot arm.[7]

Prior to her first space flight, she was subject to media attention due to her gender. During a press conference, she was asked questions like, "Will the flight affect your reproductive organs?" and "Do you weep when things go wrong on the job?" Despite this and the historical significance of the mission, Ride insisted that she saw herself in only one way—as an astronaut.[7] On June 18, 1983, she became the first American woman in space as a crew member on space shuttle Challenger for STS-7. She was preceded by two Soviet women, Valentina Tereshkova in 1963 and Svetlana Savitskaya in 1982. The five-person crew of the STS-7 mission deployed two communications satellites and conducted pharmaceutical experiments. Ride was the first woman to use the robot arm in space and the first to use the arm to retrieve a satellite.[5]

According to Roger Boisjoly, the engineer who warned of the technical problems that led to the Challenger disaster, after the entire workforce of Morton-Thiokol shunned him Ride was the only public figure to show support for him when he went public with his pre-disaster warnings. Sally Ride hugged him publicly to show her support for his efforts.[14]

Ride wrote or co-wrote seven books[15] on space aimed at children, with the goal of encouraging children to study science.[16][17]

Personal life

Sally Ride while promoting the Sally Ride Science Festival at UCSD in 2006

Ride was extremely private about her personal life. In 1982, she married fellow NASA astronaut Steve Hawley. They divorced in 1987.[20]

After Ride's death, her obituary revealed that her partner of 27 years was Tam O'Shaughnessy, a professor emerita of school psychology at San Diego State University and childhood friend, who met her when both were aspiring tennis players.[21][22] O'Shaughnessy was also a science writer and, later, the co-founder of Sally Ride Science.[23][24] O'Shaughnessy now serves as the Chief Executive Officer and Chair of the Board of Sally Ride Science.[25] They wrote six acclaimed children's science books together.[15] Their relationship was revealed by the company and confirmed by her sister, who said she chose to keep her personal life private, including her sickness and treatments.[26][27] She is the first known LGBT astronaut.[28][29]

Ride directed public outreach and educational programs for NASA’s GRAIL mission, which sent twin satellites to map the moon’s gravity. On December 17, 2012, the two GRAIL probes, Ebb and Flow, were directed to complete their mission by crashing on an unnamed lunar mountain near the crater Goldschmidt. NASA announced that it was naming the landing site in honor of Sally Ride.[37][38]Flying magazine ranked Ride at number 50 on their list of the "51 Heroes of Aviation" in 2013.[39]

Legacy

In April 2013, the U.S. Navy announced that a research ship would be named in honor of Ride.[40] This was done in 2014 with the christening of the oceanographic research vessel RV Sally Ride (AGOR-28).[41]